The Canyons (2013)

The greatest professor I ever had was Sebastian David Guy Knowles.  I had the distinct pleasure in taking three of his courses at the Ohio State University, as well as him being the faculty coordinator for the study abroad I did in England in 1996.  He’s absolutely brilliant.  One of the courses I took with him was an honors seminar called Time in the 20^th Century, where we looked at how time factored into literature throughout the 1900s.  It was an awesome class (in fact, the three honors seminars I took at OSU were the best classes I ever took – nothing in graduate school came close).  For our final paper, I didn’t do an analysis so much as a synthesis, combining lyrics from 1980s pop songs, lines from Alan Moore’s The Watchmen, various news stories from the 1980s and quotes by characters from Bret Easton Ellis novels.  My thesis was that the 1980s were the world’s apocalypse, and we’ve been living in a post-apocalypse ever since.  Ellis was (and still is, to some degree) my favorite living author.  When I turned the paper in, Seb grimaced.  “How could someone as intelligent as you like someone like Bret Easton Ellis?!?” he seethed.  I was so utterly euphoric about him thinking I was intelligent that I missed the last part of the sentence until hours later.  To Seb, and honestly, quite a lot of people, Ellis is dreck.  There’s plenty of hatred and dismissal about his works.  Misogynistic, vapid (I’m seeing that word come up a lot in reviews of The Canyons), depraved, and a host of other derogatory adjectives are associated with Ellis.  He’s a social satirist.  I don’t think this is lost on many people, but it doesn’t seem to make Ellis any easier to swallow for everyone.  Everyone, that is, except for his fans.

Me & BEE at a book signing in DC 9/14/2005.

But I’m not totally ga-ga for him.  While I love his first four works (Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, American Psycho and The Informers, all of which have been adapted into films), I haven’t really liked his last three (Glamorama, Lunar Park and Imperial Bedrooms), although I like his social essays and tweets.  But enjoying his work does make one question oneself the same way one would for enjoying anything that is mostly considered socially unacceptable.  Why do I like him?  I think he has a certain strain of honesty about humans and what they are or can be capable of.  The characters that populate his stories are often very concerned with the way the world perceives them and on materialism (very 80s Reaganomics).  They frequently use each other or are used, mostly for hedonistic pleasure.  Characters drink, do drugs, engage in casual sex, and inflict pain in an attempt at pushing whatever perceived boundaries may be out there, sometimes to find that there really are no boundaries, no one or nothing to hem in their conduct.  This frequently leads to momentary despair, isolation, abandon.  But then, the characters consciously or unconsciously return to their lives, not making any adjustments.  It’s very like the end of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable.  “I can’t go on.  I’ll go on.”  There is a level of absurdity to Ellis that, like in Beckett, is tragicomic.  One of the other classes I took with Seb was a class entirely on Beckett.  I don’t think Seb gave Ellis a chance.

So when I heard that Ellis was working with Paul Schrader to make a film called The Canyons, I was giddy.  Schrader directed one of my all-time favorite films, Mishima:  A Life in Four Chapters, and then there was Ellis, who increasingly seemed, in his last three works, to take a very filmic approach to his writing (even so far as to include camera directions in Glamorama and Lunar Park and to have a meta-discussion of the film version of Less Than Zero in Imperial Bedrooms).  What was also new about this project was that it was to be funded mostly by Kickstarter, so that the filmmakers could function outside of Hollywood constraints and make the movie they wanted.  That’s very much in keeping with the sort of content Ellis writes.  The adaptation of LTZ, in my estimation, the WORST adaptation of all time, killed off a character and changed the ending in order to sanitize and present an anti-drug message.  AP’s adaptation, while good, really pushes the idea that Patrick didn’t do all the things we saw him do, which I really never felt came through in the novel (the mixing up of who people are and their relationships is something that is clear and an important part of the book).  I agree with Ellis that the best adaptationof his work was RoA, but the book, with its many narrators, was treated like a film and not just retelling a plot.  It’s great (watched it again last night).  I really like the way the film plays around with time (reversing the film, split screening).  But out of all of Ellis’s works, RoA is the most approachable.  TI has an impressive amount of star power but ultimately doesn’t gel (too much emphasis on connecting the stories together, which isn’t a big deal in the book).  Also, they left out what I think is the best short story in the book, about the vampires (weird, just tried to look up the table of contents on Amazon, and the book appears to be out of print?).  But, it’s difficult to try to reproduce Ellis in film form accurately.  So, going studio-free with Schrader sounded like a good plan.

WhileEllis said the article was exaggerated, it is a pretty good idea to read the New York Times article where a reporterwas allowed on the set to be a fly on the wall.  The biggest concern about TC was not the limited budget or the Ellis-generated material or even that the main character of the film, Christian (great choice of name) was to be the first non-porn film for James Deen (who has been in, I kid you not, over 1000films [IMDb him] – that’s a lot of porn, people).  The real fright was that the film would also star Lindsay Lohan, fresh from rehab.  She’s a bit of a train wreck and playing a character that seems to not stray too far from her real life.  Does she do a good job?  Yes.  Could any number of female actors have played the role as well, if not better?  Yes.  I guess the name here added to the salability or potential audience appeal, and as noted by both Ellis and Schrader, the film was completed on time and under budget, so it couldn’t have been too bad.

I would really like to see the film again before posting this, but I’ve been thinking about it often since only one viewing, and I don’t want to wait until the end of November for the DVD.  There are several great aspects to the film that I want to discuss.  It is by no means a great film, but it comes very close to getting several things right.

The first item, which I feel is the most important and biggest missed opportunity, is its commentary on the film industry today.  In the beginning of the film, the audience is shown a montage of defunct, dilapidated movie theaters (you can see some of this in the trailer above).  This just on the tails of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, StevenSoderbergh and other big name directors saying how film is dying.  The practice of going to a movie theater as a shared cultural experience is being traded in for watching movies on your iPhone.  Big budget box office superhero films dominating the landscape while smaller, story-driven films are harder to fund and distribute.  Oh, woe is they.  But there’s another side to the story.  Go to a website like Box Office Mojo and see that other than a few years (admittedly, the last two are part of it), ticket sales have been going up since 1980.  And to look at films that are being nominated for Oscars, they are still of the character and plot driven ilk.  The Avengers and Iron Man are not winning Best Picture any time soon.  Since the digital revolution of the late 1990s, it has become much easier to make a film on one’s own.  Anyone can upload to YouTube.  So, what is the reality?  Are movies on their way out or thriving?  I think that Ellis and Schrader making this statement early on in the film is brilliant, because it is a film about making films (Christian produces movies, Tara works in films, Ryan’s an actor in Christian’s film, Gina is Christian’s production assistant – all the main people in the film, aside from Christian’s psychiatrist, are in the film business).  There are also the hand-held video phone films Christian is making.  The film is drenched in film.  But, TC doesn’t take this idea far enough.  It is later revisited when Tara and Gina have lunch and Tara asks when was the last time Gina went and saw a film in a theater (not a premiere, but a film that she really wanted to see, on her own, sans professional obligation).  I think for the questions to be raised and dropped is disappointing, because the question is important and will continue to be addressed, especially within the next 10 years of movie-making.  And it’s a low-budget Kickstarter film that is both raising the question but also being nostalgic about it at the same time.  Schrader certainly can recall a time that Hollywood reigned supreme.  He’s part of the cultural elite, AFI-member critic-gone-filmmaker coming up from the late 1960s / early 1970s Hollywood that was the period of the auteur, until that fire engulfed itself in the early 1980s and control was pried away from directors and back to the studios (and more specifically, the big name stars in the 80s).  And there are so many references to film in the works of Ellis.  Are they sad or happy about the journey Hollywood is on (willingly or not)?  Poignant stuff, but not resolved.  Was that the point?  It doesn’t seem right.

Another thing that is wonderful is to see Ellis’s first real screenplay (not adaptation, but original screenplay) feel and sound so “Ellis.”  These characters sound and act like Ellis characters.  And the male actors, James Deen and Nolan Funk, do an excellent job of being male Ellis characters.  I guess to a certain degree, Lohan does a good job at being a female Ellis character, but other than Lauren in RoA, Ellis doesn’t do a very good job with female characters (Blair from LTZ and IB definitely doesn’t count).  The climax of the film, as Tara is leaving Christian, and Christian forces her to be his alibi, is classic Ellis form.  “Nod for me, baby.”  I got chills watching it.

And the film looks good.  It does not look cheaply made.  There are many films out there with much larger budgets that look like shit.  TC was made for $250,000.  The Room (2003), arguably one of the worst films ever made, had a budget of $6,000,000.  I wonder what Schrader could have done with six million.

As of August 29, 2013, TC has only made $50,000 (it’s only been released in nine theaters so far).  I do not know if this includes VOD (I don’t think it does, as that number is derived from box office figures).  I know I watched it on VOD.  If and when it gets international distribution and DVD / Blu ray / broadcast rights, it may have a shot of at least breaking even.  The press about the film has been mostly brutal, and reviews have pretty much panned it.  That’s really too bad, on all fronts.  It’s too bad that Schrader couldn’t make the comeback film he wanted (he hasn’t worked as a director since 2008’s Adam Resurrected – anyone seen that?).  It’s too bad that Ellis’s reputation will keep viewers from checking this out.  It’s too bad that the film doesn’t follow through on some great ideas.  If you check out the interviews from the Venice Film Festival on YouTube, you get the feeling that Schrader and Ellis are apprehensively pleased at what they accomplished, as am I.  I just wish it could have been more.

One thing, and I’m probably opening up a can of worms unnecessarily here, but this film is often labeled “erotic.”  I’m assuming this is because there are sex scenes in it.  Does that make something erotic, just by showing people having sex?  Humans obviously get turned on by a variety of things, and perhaps chiefly among the stimuli is watching other people.  I’m assuming this because of the rabid popularity, throughout all ages and eras, of pornography.  And I must admit, given that James Deen is such a porn star, I was wondering if I would get to see his dick in the movie (answer, yes).  But, and perhaps I’m an anomaly, but simply showing people, however many, copulating isn’t titillating.  There have been plenty of examples of on-screen meltdowns, especially during the Hayes Code, pre-1966, when filmmakers had to suggest but not show, and how oftentimes directors admitted to having to get creative.  Some of those scenes do far more to arouse than just watching a foursome go at it.  Maybe it is because imagination has to be involved, but one of the things discussed in my adaptation class is how when we read a work, we get to fill in all the blanks about characters, setting, etc. inside our minds.  Once someone takes that license out of our hands and directs us to their visions, then we lose our agency.  But I think it’s cheap to say something is erotic merely because it shows fornication.  And in this film, especially with the foursome that Schrader had to disrobe himself in order to get Lohan to agree to participate, it is not hot.

Chan-wook Park's Vengeance Trilogy

Chan-wook Park is a Korean film director whose first project came out in 1992.  When reviewing the history of Korea in the 20^th century, there is an overriding assumption that post-Korean War (mid-1953), South Korea was living in a democracy, much like the one the United States set up for Japan post-WWII.  However, like Japan, to call South Korea’s government democratic is far from accurate.  They were pretty tyrannical to their people (military governments, coups, assassinations).  It really isn’t until the late 1980s / early 1990s that things improve overall.  That’s when the stranglehold by government on culture and expression begins to lessen.  People had lived under decades of totalitarianism.  Chan-wook Park is at the roots of the beginnings of a flowering of Korean cinema that truly distinguishes itself from other Asian styles (namely Hong Kong and Japanese and what has become Chinese cinema post-1997).

Park’s first big film is JSA (Joint Security Area) (2000).  A trend that is often seen in Korean cinema is this strange, sad relationship they have with the north.  By the way, the Koreans I meet never distinguish between North and South Korea.  When they talk about Korea, they just say “Korea.”  You get the overall impression from Korean cinema that while they are wary of the north, they long to be reunited with parts of their families “stranded” up there.  South Korea has had a pretty successful economy for decades, and they are fully aware of how dire the situation is for people living in the north.  The Jekyll / Hyde north negotiations for reunification on the North’s terms are frustrating, with very little headway made since sincere talks began in the late 1980s.  JSA tells the story of a border incident that becomes a murder investigation.  It includes Kang-ho Song, one of my favorite Korean actors (love Memories of Murder) as well as other actors that become stars.  Song is in two of the three Vengeance films.

Park’s trilogy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002), Oldboy (2003), and Lady Vengeance (2005) is loosely linked together, mostly due to the subject matter (hence the name).  Stylistically, they conform quite well to a brutality that I find to be singularly Korean.  That is not to say other cultures aren’t brutal in their films (recent Scandinavian crime films [think the Dragon Tattoo films or Headhunters] are almost but not quite of the same vein).  This may sound reductionist, but I think it has to do with being ruled by the military for 50 + while being told they were living in a democracy.  It fosters a lot of distrust, especially, from what I’ve read and films I’ve seen, of the enforcement of law, which seems unconcerned with right or wrong but just getting something solved.  I’ve seen so many scenes of police (I’ve seen a lot of Korean movies, even some of the Caspar Milquetoast romances, which are also in a pathos class by themselves) beating confessions out of prisoners who don’t want justice but admission to clear the case from the books.  Ethics is not dealt with the same as in Western cinema.  When you see a woman in danger in Western films, the chances are that someone’s going to rescue her, or she won’t be too badly damaged.  You cannot make the same assumption with Korean film.  The same goes for children.

Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (2002) is the tale of two “protagonists.”  One is Ryu, a deaf and dumb young man whose sister needs a kidney transplant.  He works long hours at a physically demanding job to try to save the money for her.  When he is told that no matches are available, he seeks out the black market to fill the void.  He must give all the money he’s saved to the black market for the organ, as well as one of his own kidneys in exchange.  His money and organ are taken, but he does not get a kidney for his sister.  Directly after this betrayal, a kidney becomes available through the donor program, but he has lost all his money to the black market dealers.  His girlfriend, who belongs to a socialist terrorist organization (no way that would have flown before the Sixth Republic), suggests kidnapping a child of one of the people who runs the factory Ryu was recently fired from (seriously, this guy cannot catch a break).  This starts in motion the second protagonist’s story arch, Dong-jin Park (played by Kang-ho Song).  It is Park’s daughter Ryu and his girlfriend kidnap.

This is a very plot-driven film, and I am only scratching the surface of what happens.  I can’t go into any more or I would spoil the film.  Unfortunately, no one’s story line is resolved happily, which is true of all three of the Vengeance films.  But there are some amazingly beautiful shots in Mr. Vengeance (two that leap to mind are the underwater shot of Park flicking his cigarette into a lake and the stair-climbing sequence going to see the black market organ seller).  And you do feel sympathy for the characters, even if they do truly horrible things to each other.  It reinforces the idea that we are all two to three steps away from living in a nightmare, and if someone or something pushes us, we’d be there.  Out of the three films, this is my second favorite, but that is saying something as it is so great on its own.  It is just that the second film is so powerful and remarkable.

Oldboy (2003) is a masterpiece of Korean cinema.  I’m pretty apprehensive to see what Spike Lee is going to do with his remake, which is coming out this year (just in time for Thanksgiving, but DON’T take the family) and stars Josh Brolin.  Unlike Mr. Vengeance, this is more of a character study.  The story focuses on Oh Dae-su (Min-sik Choi, who plays the main bad guy in the last of the trilogy), a sort of everyman who perhaps drinks too much (he sort of misses his daughter’s birthday).  He is captured and put in what looks like a cheap hotel room which becomes a sort of cell.  He is there for 15 years, with no explanation as to why he is there.  As you can imagine, he goes a little crazy.  He can see world events on the small television in his room, so he can see how time is passing (he also sees that his wife is murdered [he is the suspect] and that his daughter is put in foster care).  Just as inexplicably as he is captured, he is released, and he sets out trying to find out who was behind his incarceration and what was the motive behind such action.  He is given a cell phone and money, and it starts to look like he is a tragic pawn in someone else’s sick game.  To go any further would be to reveal too much, so I’ll stop there.  Suffice it to say there’s a touch of Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” involved, but while Fortunato’s  “crime” was almost undetectable, Oh Dae-su’s casual comment about what he saw turns out to have gloomy (if completely unintentional) results.

Again, there are sequences that are great examples of filmic moments (the scene where Oh Dae-su fends off multiple attackers with a hammer is vicious and breathtaking).  The creepiness of the overall story is borderline disgusting, but the characters react appropriately.  In the pursuit of vengeance, as Nishi points out in The Bad Sleep Well, one has to become a monster.  The ending of Oldboy underscores this aspect as Oh Dae-su tries to use hypnosis to wrest the evil inside himself.  One begins to wonder if Park is criticizing the concept of vengeance in his study of it.  While injustice (actual or perceived) is punished, it doesn’t make anything better in these two films.  But it is such an indulgent, careful study that it’s hard to ascertain Park’s position.  Why spend all this creative time and effort on something so horrible?

The trilogy culminates in Lady Vengeance (2005).  While my least favorite of the three, it comes the closest to showing vengeance as somewhat positive and gratifying.  Again, we have someone incarcerated for a long stretch of time (13 ½ years), and unlike Oh Dae-su, Geum-ja Lee is not guilty of why she is put away.  She is convicted of killing a child, but the real murderer, Mr. Baek (played by Min-sik Choi) still runs free, torturing and killing more children.  Once Lee is released, she sets about executing a plan that, according to flashbacks and character exposition, has been in place since she was first put away.  Park spends a lot of time painting the backstory of Lee and other characters, some of whom I found to not really relate to the plot that is this plan that Lee is following.  Some of it seems tangential. Her whole plan is to exact vengeance on Mr. Baek, but it seems to take a very long time to get to it.  However, when we do arrive, it is probably the most appalling part of the three films.

Mr. Baek is an elementary school teacher, so all the kids trust him, which makes his crimes of kidnapping, torturing and murdering the children all the more grotesque.  Lee captures Baek.  She then brings all the parents of the murdered children together.  Baek had videotaped him torturing and murdering the children, and Lee shows these tapes to the parents.  The situation that Park sets up for this scene is beyond horrific (vomitous, even).  Parents faint, sob, throw themselves on the floor.  Then Lee (who is being backed by the detective that originally put her away for one of the murders) tells the parents that the person who did this to their children is in the other room.  They can either turn him over to the police with all this evidence or each take turns stabbing and beating Baek to death.

The ethical dilemma presented (although extreme, but normally such sort of hypothetical situations are used in ethics discussions [save the old woman or the priceless work of art, etc.]) is challenging.  Do you do what is lawful or what your emotions tell you?  Lee does stir the fire by showing the videos before presenting the option, but what would you do?  As one parent notes, killing Baek will not bring their children back – it will only torture the person who tortured their children.

Often when I read or see the news I’m confronted with how much humans are just another group of animals.  We put on airs that we are at the top of the food chain, but there is so much evidence to suggest otherwise that I don’t believe it.  We are capable of tremendous accomplishments in science, technology, and art.  But the amount of cruelty we exact upon each other is so astronomical that it paints the Mona Lisa with blood.  It is not surprising that the parents choose to kill Baek.  It isn’t even surprising anymore to me that people like Baek exist.  I think it is brave that Park explores the inhumanity and humanity that comes with loss experienced by the human condition.  I don’t think a lot of directors would have the guts to take things to the extremes that Park does and force us to watch the unwatchable not for the gross-out factor but for the “look at the depravity we are capable of.”  There are many films from cultures all over the world that attempt to nauseate the audience with excessive violence, but few raise any important questions.  These three films, for those who can stand them, are serious investigations into the true heart of darkness in humans.

Does this really suck that much?

I was eating in a Chinese / Japanese restaurant (Asian Bistro in downtown Silver Spring) one day for lunch when I overheard a man trying to order food at a nearby table.  It wasn’t that he was speaking loudly, but the restaurant was not very busy.  He was asking about fish and chicken dishes, and he wanted to know if he could have some roasted chicken or fish in lemon / butter and some potatoes.  The waitress, who wasn’t a native English speaker, was having difficulty addressing the man’s questions.  She would try to point him to dishes that were somewhat similar, and he would ask her how the dishes were prepared.  “Don’t you have any normal chicken?” he asked.  This wasn’t a young man, so even if he had just stepped into downtown Silver Spring from some backwater, it was unlikely he had never come across an Asian restaurant before.  I drew the conclusion, perhaps because I couldn’t come up with any other probable answer, that something had to be mentally wrong with this fellow.  Why else would someone go to an Asian restaurant, especially when there are so many other restaurants in the area, and try to order non-Asian food?  And on top of that, then get upset when they couldn’t provide him with what he wanted?

Because we have expectations.  We operate on assumptions.  We rely on past experiences to help us make decisions and negotiate the world around us.  This is commonplace knowledge.  But this weekend, I got to see an exercise where there were expectations and assumptions in play, but it was the audience that seemed to get it wrong, at least, in my humble yet brilliant opinion.

There’s been a lot of brouhaha lately from the critical community about just how bad this summer’s (2013’s) movies suck.  You’d think the sky was falling.  But I was holding out hope for two movies that are not big budget:  The Canyons (and this is for purely personal reasons, namely Bret Easton Ellis collaborating with Paul “Mishima:  A Life in Four Chapters” Schrader) and Only God Forgives.  So two Fridays ago, sitting in front of my summer 171 class, I pulled up rottentomatoes.com and instantly felt deflated.  OGF scored a humiliating 13% fresh, which went down to 11% after clicking on Top Critics (what I always tell my classes to do to avoid the riff-raff).  As of right now (7/29/13, 6:14 pm, EST), it has only inched up 5 percentage points.

Oh, no… Say it isn’t so!  Really, that bad?  I started to look at some reviews, which included comments like “unwatchable,” “fatally dull,” “one-dimensional video game of death,” and “pretentious.”  Aw, man.  Shit.

Why did I care?  Because I really liked Drive (2011).  I thought it was a fresh pastiche of 1980s Miami Vice-style crime stories with sudden, brutal violence.  I liked Bronson (2008), also directed by Nicolas Winding Refn, which was incredibly manic but stylistic and intriguing.  I was taken in by the fact that Ryan Gosling, who has enough star power to choose anything he’d want to be in, would return to working with Refn (who also wrote the screenplay, as he does with most of his projects) on what is, when you look at its competition right now, beyond a budget film (It didn’t even top out at 5 million!  And some critics called Now You See Me “cheap” for the low price tag of 75 million!).  In Thailand.  As a character more vacuous than Driver.  I’m most honored when a student takes a second class with me, especially if it is something they don’t need.  Gosling can make all the money he wants to, yet he went with this.  Throw in Kristen Scott Thomas, and you had me at hello.

Only God Forgives, like a lot of low budget, indie films, is releasing as video on demand as well as theaters.  It is playing at AFI, but given all the flack it was receiving, I was reticent to buy a ticket.  When I saw it was VOD as well, I decided I’d stream it.  I’ll be doing the same thing with The Canyons this Friday (8/2), even though the reviews for that are already abysmal.

Guess what?  I really liked OGF.  In fact, when I reached the end (which resolved, in my estimation, perfectly, and was not long and drawn out like some films that seem like they do not know when or how to end), I was scratching my head at why this film got so slammed with negativity.  If you are conversant with the genre, or this director’s work, then you were provided with an artistic (is that what they meant by “pretentious”?) and vicious film.  This is not a plot-driven film, but then again, most films that are action-based aren’t.  The plot is an excuse to move from one set piece to the next.  An excellent example of this is The Raid:  Redemption (2011).  There is a semblance of a plot where a SWAT team has to clear a high rise apartment complex of drug dealers and a paper-thin subplot of the protagonist having a brother who is a drug dealer, but really, it’s about the amazing fight choreography and deft cinematography of those fights.  The sequel is coming out in Indonesia this September.  Can’t wait to see that when it gets here.  Effective, knew what it was, and didn’t try to be something it was not.  I admire that sort of integrity.  I will be the first to underscore that TR:R, Drive and OGF are not for everyone (in fact, they aren’t for a lot of people), but for the audience that likes this genre, all three movies are outstanding.

So, where’s the disconnect with the critical community?  Drive scored high (87% of Top Critics) on Rotten Tomatoes.  Critics fawned over it.  Was it because it was set domestically (none of those pesky subtitles to read)?  It had Albert Brooks (who, incidentally, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes for this role), Bryan Cranston, Ron Pearlman, Carey Mulligan and Christina Hendricks?  Ryan Gosling’s character was more of a “good” guy than this role?  I don’t know.  If anything, I think Refn improved his directing techniques in OGF.  His color palette (which includes a lot of deep gem tones) combined with the kinesis of the camera is hypnotic at times.  One critic I read compared his use of color to that of David Lynch, but whereas Lynch likes static camera shots more (I think to up the creep factor – leaving a shot go uncomfortably long, forcing you to watch something past when other directors would cut away), Refn’s camera is constantly in motion.  That is not to say there are no static shots, but when Refn does employ them, especially in sequences where Julian is in those odd transmigrations where he appears in one place, then another, then back to let us know he never left but his mind put him elsewhere, create more impact to when static shots are used. 

Another point of brilliance in this film is the use of sound.  I am almost tempted to go see this in the theater to see if the sound replication is the same, but on my (admittedly not high-end) sound bar, all music is very loud, and dialogue ranges from sounding like you are standing next to the character that is speaking, to muted character dialogue (where you can barely hear) to cutting out the sound on the dialogue, yet we know the characters are speaking, as their lips are moving and other characters are clearly listening to them.  Why this is brilliant:  remember, this movie is not about plot or character development.  When a character is heard clearly, this is information that will help the audience with what is going on.  When the character is muted, when we can barely hear and I am turning the sound way up, it is incidental information.  The sort of pat back and forth you would hear in that kind of scene in this kind of movie, so do you really need to pay close attention?  The true effectiveness is when character voices are completely removed.  I’ll give two examples.  Julian goes to confront his brother’s killer, who has had his arm cut off by Chang (Vithaya Pansringarm, who, for my money, was the best actor in this film), the police detective, who is furious that a father would whore out his underage daughter (Chang has a young daughter).  When Julian arrives at the father’s house, there is no sound when the father, tearful, clutching his stump that used to be his arm, explains what happened and why he killed Julian’s brother.  We don’t need to hear it.  We’ve already sat through the murdesr of the daughter and Julian’s brother, then Chang’s wrath.  Why would we need it explained?  What this additionally allows is to just view the emotion behind the scene.  It gets distilled down to its essence:   two people who have recently lost a family member, who may not have that undying love that we are supposed to have for said family member.  When Julian does not exact revenge, as he was instructed to do by his hellbeast-of-a-mother, Crystal, it makes perfect sense.

The second example is at the very end of the film.  We’ve seen Chang performing at his favorite karaoke bar, and some of his men always seem to accompany him and look on, in admiration (or fear, or both, but their gaze seems too tender to be fearful).  The whole place watches in quiet approval.  This is a man who doles out justice.  Granted, the justice is uncannily harsh, but it is justice in a place that seems mostly devoid of it.  There’s respect there.  The last performance, we do not hear him sing.  We know he is singing, but we focus on his face, on his posture, on his eyes.  This is what vengeance looks like, and it likes to sing karaoke after a hard day’s work.  And then the film ends.  Flawless.

I reject comments that this film lacks morality.  Chang has a well-developed sense of what is right and wrong.  And one thing that is refreshing about this sense is that it does not discriminate.  We often see women spared from real retribution in films on the grounds that women and children cannot be subjected to the same sort of retaliation that men must endure (I guess because they are men?  What other criteria is there?  Can women and children not also commit unspeakable acts?).  Chang deals with Crystal the same way he deals with others in the film.  She’s done so much wrong that she is fully deserving of his punishment.  She is a victimizer, not a victim, like the girl that Billy rapes and kills, which is the initial conflict of this film.  When Crystal earlier sends Julian and others to kill Chang at his house, Julian is informed that everyone in the house needs to die.  Julian, a disturbed simpleton, has enough of a moral compass to kill one of the goons before the goon can kill Chang’s daughter.  For Julian, it’s not that the daughter is out of bounds because of age but that she simply isn’t part of the revenge “owed” his brother.  It just doesn’t factor in.  If he had known everyone was to be killed, I would wager he would not have allowed the housekeeper to be killed either.  But the cop out front, that’s ok, as he’s an obstacle.  There are simply certain things that are out of bounds.  For someone who runs a fighting ring, Julian does understand that there are rules to follow.

There is no hero in this film.  The closest we come is Chang, and he is so extreme that while I did root for him, I couldn’t call him a “hero.”  Maybe that’s a sore spot for critics – Julian (Gosling, our star) is not our hero.  He can’t even beat Chang in an honest fistfight.  There’s certainly plenty of villains and bad behavior, but that’s been around for a while now.  I genuinely don’t understand the misguided reviews the film has received.  Or, if I have identified aspects in this post that critics would take umbrage with, then I do understand, but find them overall petty.  The film’s not for everyone, and in a summer full of films trying to be for everyone, it is refreshing to see something not trying to please everyone and pleasing no one.  This film pleased me.   But then again, I knew what restaurant I was sitting in and knew what to expect when I ordered.

Two Films by Kôji Wakamatsu

No, the two films by Kôji Wakamatsu that I recently watched are not Criterion films, but if I had a bet to make on an auteur whose work may eventually make it into Criterion, this would be a safe one to make.  He started directing in what is considered the Japanese New Wave, he’s Japanese (Criterion seems to like Japanese directors), he’s not commercial, but his work tackles significant issues regarding post-WWII Japan and is critically acclaimed.  To chalk him up as merely a pinku director is giving him way too short of shrift, at least given the two films I’ve watched.  There’s another good reason why Criterion might turn an eye to him sometime – most of his works are not available in the US.

To say I checked him out because he made a movie called 11.25 The Day He Chose His Own Fate (2012) (a biopic about Yukio Mishima’s last years) is not quite accurate, as United Red Army (2007) and Caterpillar (2010) were already in my Netflix cue before I even knew about the Mishima movie meant something I had read previously compelled me to look Wakamatsu up.  Both films focus on historical time periods, both films are incredibly brutal, both films are not fun to watch, and both films are unflinching in their negative portrayal of the Japanese.  I can’t imagine that these two films grossed very much at the Japanese box office.  Unfortunately, the next project he was going to work on, which centered on the Tokyo Electric Power Company and the Japanese nuclear lobby, will never come to light, as Wakamatsu was hit by a taxi and died last year.

United Red Army is three hours and ten minutes long.  When flipping through my cue, I would see that, cringe, and move on (I do the same thing with Intolerance).  Finally, given the extra incentive of learning more about a director who made a movie on Mishima, I bit.  It’s a film about the Japanese communist movement of the late-1960s / early-1970s, mostly populated by idealistic students sick of the capitalist, pro-American government and their policies.  Mishima was on the other side of this battle, with the ultra-militarists (reinstate the Emperor) who were against the capitalist, pro-American government and their policies.  He once went to a university to talk to the students.  Nothing really came of the talk, but it is very interesting to learn more about the background of this ideological antithesis who ultimately wanted the same thing Mishima did.

I’ve seen The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008 [interesting that these two films were made around the same time]), so I knew a little bit about what was going on in Germany.  Also interesting that these two radical movements were coming out of Axis power countries, youth born during and directly after WWII coming to terms (or not) with their countries’ recent pasts and reacting.  Wakamatsu was actually part of the movement for a time but left, so he has a unique perspective into what happened.  Some reviews I’ve read say that he tries to go out of his way to create an unbiased account of what happened, and his jutsuroku (combining actual footage with acted footage to create a docu-drama sort of feel) approach strives to be a kind of historical recounting, but I disagree that this is impartial.  He chose the subject matter.  He even funded the film himself when no one would give him money to “set history straight,” as it were.  He used his own house and wrecked part of it for the finale of the film.  And if you wish to maintain that describing the internal purge within the group, which takes up much of the second part of the film (the first part concentrating on how the groups and factions formed and the third [last] part on the siege of an inn in Asama), as being unbiased, then you’re wrong.  This was a personal film for Wakamatsu.

The film is meticulous in its detail, providing names and ages of all the people that come across the screen, and since there are many, it is difficult to track who is who (especially since they often wear masks) until characters become more solidified in the second part.  Actually, to call them “characters” is inaccurate on two counts.  One, these were real people.  Two, none of them are fleshed out very much, so other than “pretty girl” or “brutal guy with buzz cut,” they didn’t really register.  Until they start getting killed by each other.  This is where the film got bizarrely interesting.  Is it really all that hard to become a communist?  Certainly not.  China and the Soviet Union were full of them.  There was no daily “self-criticism” like the type seen in the film.  This ideal communist the leaders of the group strive to make their cohorts is irrational and illogical.  When self-criticizing, a man admits he had thoughts of taking over leadership and using the group for his own means.  Mori seethes “You’re a Stalinist!” and has him executed.  That the group is complicit in this is totally unthinkable.  The next character, presumably thinking the same thing as I, that Mori’s bloodlust had been sated, says that he also was guilty of such thoughts.  Mori is beside himself.  He has that man executed as well.  A jealous woman, Toyama, who is part of the leadership, hates a beautiful young lady who was part of the founding members of the organization.  Toyama berates her for wearing makeup and fixing her hair.  Why did she come to the forest to train, Toyama constantly grills her, if she was going to cling to such mannerisms, which are truly out of step with being a true communist?  Toyama and the group eventually force this woman to bury her executed friends and beat herself up.  She dies a few days later.

Wakamatsu stares the lunacy of this group straight on.  How can a group fight global democracy and capitalism when they can’t even seem to be a cogent group themselves?  They are their own worst enemy.  As numbers dwindle and the police close in, one by one, members get arrested.  The final showdown at Asama, valiant as it is misdirected (taking a stand against police who will obviously, with the establishment, spin the incident even more extremely than it already was), was a complete waste.  Shooting cops to make a political point won’t garner much public support, especially when you won’t let a member of the public go free (and no, she wasn’t a hostage to them, but that’s their own ideology spiraling out of control).

No one in this film ends up looking noble or redeeming.   The ending scroll gives the timeline of the group, post-Asama.  I was surprised to find that they were still active into the 2000s, with all the trials, punishments, executions, other terrorist activities, and splintering.  There is a lot of pain, way too much pain that comes from this.  And for what?  Where is communism thriving?  Are you going to call China communist, because that’s naïve.  So much lost; so little gained.  It seems like a true waste and dreary in its finale.

And if you think URA was bleak, it was nowhere near as defeatist as Caterpillar.  Tadashi Kurokawa, a man from a small farming village, is conscripted to join the Japanese Imperial Army for the Sino-Japanese War in 1940.  He is sent to China.   During a battle, as he and his fellow soldiers are raping, maiming and killing Chinese women, he is trapped in a burning house.  He loses both arms, both legs, is badly burned on half of his head and rendered deaf and mute.  Yet, he is still alive.  He is returned to his wife, Shigeko, who is understandably mortified.  Just as he sacrificed for the Emperor, she must now take care of her husband.

Fun, right?  It gets worse.  Tadashi is a brute of a man.  Before being deployed, he would often abuse Shigeko.  She had not given him a child, so he calls her barren and beats her.  Another layer of horror to this story is that the returned Tadashi is hailed as not just a war hero but a war god.  Someone who survived “battle” to still be alive is elevated to almost kami status.  People bow to Tadashi whenever his wife wheels him around town in a wheelbarrow.  In a time where food is scarce, village women will give Shigeko precious eggs for the war god.  No one knows (nor can Tadashi say) just how he became so horribly disfigured, but that the root is monstrous behavior like raping and killing makes celebrations of Tadashi all the more stomach-churning.  What is also disgusting is that Tadashi often asks to see his medals (he is awarded three for his “bravery” and the newspaper article about him) as a means of a pacifier of sorts.  They seem to underscore his heroism, which isn’t even true, but he takes comfort in the recognition.

Furthermore, Tadashi is an immense strain, as you can imagine, on Shigeko, who still has to go out and farm rice and knit fabric at night.  She now has to bathe, feed, and tend to Tadashi’s other … er … digestive functions, very much like taking care of an infant.  But that’s still not enough.  He pulls at her clothes with his teeth and writes with a pencil in his mouth whenever he wants sex.  And he wants sex often.  Shigeko is bound to oblige, not only out of marital duty but duty to the Emperor.  She has to be ultra-care-giver to this man who used to beat and debase her.  She eventually starts to unravel.

I may be biased in my reading of this film, but one thing I found totally grotesque is that Tadashi does not seem to have a conscious.  There are times when we see him flashing back to the women he was raping before the fire consumed the building while his own wife is having sex with him.  He reacts with grunting noises, but it isn’t clear if this is guilt he is feeling.  It’s as if he is in the role of the women (in a move of power, Shigeko initiates sex instead of it being the other way around) and is horrified, not of what he did to others, but that he is feeling what he made others feel.  His constant insatiable needs, which immensely tax his wife, run parallel with how he got himself into his current state of being.  When he commits suicide at the end of the film (sorry, no spoiler alert, but I’m pretty sure even the teeny audience this post may have will not see this film after reading) by rolling out of the house into the small pond outside the front door, it seems more like he is ending his own suffering of having to rely on someone for any and all his needs than overbearing guilt for all the horrors he has visited on others.  He is truly reprehensible, which is what makes this acting performance (as well as the one given by Shigeko’s actress) all the more powerful.  She is so beaten down by expectations and her “duty,” and he is so evil and wretched.

Both films are not all that technical in nature.  URA is not particularly acted well (and is so piecemeal with its large cast that no one really has time to shine).  Its scope and link to a specific piece of history is what make it so captivating.  Caterpillar is well-acted, but the plot brings home the cruelty of humans and the fragility of life.  Wakamatsu is the type of director that has repeat performances by actors, so they are loyal to his vision.  That’s very telling.  It’s a shame we will have no more of that vision in the future.